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The Sunday Post: Eye Weren’t Even There, Guv!

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Petunia Winegum on February 22, 2015

Richard Ingrams once described Peter Cook as a conservative anarchist. The one-time editor of ‘Private Eye’ also regarded himself as such; it’s a canny label that expertly summarises the curious contradiction inherent within those sons of the establishment who made a career from mocking it in the 1960s and 70s. ‘Private Eye’ was never, say, ‘Oz’; it didn’t have a counter-cultural agenda and wasn’t staffed by social renegades who equated an allergic reaction to scissors with possessing the spirit of Che Guevara. The men from the Eye were shrewd enough to know from the off that it was more effective to engage in a long-term nibble of the hand that fed it rather than settle for one spontaneous bite.

The magazine’s real strength as it gathered confidence and gained financial stability in the immediate years following its early struggles was not so much in the occasionally savage cartoons of Gerald Scarfe or its refreshing absence of deference where public figures were concerned, but its serious investigative side, doggedly pursuing organisations and individuals long before their guilt had been either acknowledged or admitted. This element of ‘Private Eye’ has continued to the present day, committed to exposing misdeeds by politicians, police, bankers, hacks & hackers, tax evaders and the like. Several regular sections such as ‘Nooks and Corners’, ‘In the City’ and ‘Rotten Boroughs’ also name and shame those whose crimes would probably otherwise never receive widespread coverage; and whilst having the bottle to put its neck on the line has resulted in the magazine being sued for libel probably more than any publication in the history of the written word, one cannot but admire its relentless tenacity.

Those of us who read ‘Private Eye’ regularly not only look forward to the middle section for a laugh, but have come to invest a great deal of faith in its ability to dig deep and unveil villains on our behalf. Yes, it might be over half-a-century old and run by men who wouldn’t look out-of-place on a pheasant shoot with Prince Philip, but we’ve come to believe it’s on ‘our side’; we’ve come to rely and depend upon it to be there before anyone else when it comes to shining a light on some of Britain’s murkiest corners and the even murkier characters that inhabit them. It does so because we can’t.

How disappointing, then, for a magazine that has always prided itself on getting to the bottom of the bullshit that pervades the produce of Fleet Street, that it has missed – or worse still, has chosen to step away from – a most scandalous and corrupt misuse of taxpayer’s money, a most criminal abuse of the legal process, and a most pernicious pursuance of the innocent based upon the confused testimony of unreliable witnesses to assaults without evidence, swayed by ruthless law firms and prompted by police tactics provoked by pressure from media moral crusaders and mediocre MPs.

This is the sort of story ‘Private Eye’ should have been wise to from day one, the sort of story the late Paul Foot would have spent months researching and months perfecting before publishing, the sort of story that contains all the multi-layered elements that the magazine once prided itself on exhaustively exploring and exposing. And yet, it hasn’t. Right from the moment the Jimmy Savile myth was propagated by a poor man’s Roger Cook, an illiterate ex-woodentop and crass exploiter of disenchanted middle-aged women, ‘Private Eye’ – the periodical that is supposed to be able to sniff something foul from twenty paces – has decided to go with the flow of the consensus. Instead of leading the search for the truth behind the sensationalist headlines like we expect it to, it has bottled out, like a pub hard-man who talks a good fight and then fills his pants when someone asks him outside.

Instead of those that get paid to do this kind of work actually doing it, the job has been left to those that do it because the injustice of it all has fired their creative juices without the lure of a cheque – those that ironically, like many PE journalists, protect their principles with pseudonyms, even if their identities are easier to discern than those who have hidden behind perceived wisdom. I’m talking about – naturally – our very own Ms Anna Raccoon. But I’m also talking about others who have devoted over two years of their time and energy to this story. I’m talking about Moor Larkin; and Retrocool73; and Rabbitaway; and a certain Victorialucas38, who reinterpreted the findings of her fellow cyberspace seekers by using our childhood puppet pals as a metaphor for the madness (but enough about her; she’s big-headed enough as it is). Hours, days, weeks and months of genuine investigative journalism has been undertaken by people more worthy of the brave and bold traditions of ‘Private Eye’ than the magazine’s current crop of spineless and timid shadows that have opted out of their duty.

But it’s not just spinelessness and timidity that has characterised the ‘Private Eye’ approach to this scandal; there’s also a far more sinister and worrying aspect to the magazine’s strange reluctance to dirty its hands. A couple of weeks ago, I spent several hours on a train reading what was then the latest issue cover-to-cover, even sections I usually bypass. This was when I came across an odd, unaccredited piece that sought sympathy for Karin Ward, star Victim of the original ‘Exposure’ mockumentary and accuser of Freddie Starr (amongst others). Poor Karin was being sued by wicked Mr Starr, and all those who had encouraged her to expand her accusations had seemingly abandoned her to her financial fate. In the newest edition, the saga is revisited and also encompasses similar sob stories concerning the ubiquitous Meirion Jones and his former Beeb hack, Liz MacKean. Nasty old Auntie has cold-shouldered them and shown them the door. About bloody time, most of us would say; so why isn’t ‘Private Eye’ saying likewise?

Sure, ‘Private Eye’ is perennially mindful of legal action; but the threat of being taken to court has never dissuaded it from naming and shaming in the past. And, having wilfully ignored this story for two years bar toeing the party line, the ingredients are all there for the magazine to cook up a soufflé of a scandal, doing in print what many of us having been doing online since 2012. But why bother now? It’s a bit bloody belated, and I know most who have put the work in on this story would probably resent PE playing Johnny-come-lately, and scooping all the plaudits by publishing material that’s been building up out there in space while they’ve been more concerned with peddling the same angle as Fleet Street. In actual fact, even the bloody ‘Mail on Sunday’ has dared to go where ‘Private Eye’ has shied away from, courtesy of David Rose. Is this what it’s come to?

I won’t be ‘cancelling my subscription’ as a result of this. ‘Private Eye’ still makes my Friday every fortnight it appears; and there’s always enough in there to warrant forking out £1.80 for. But I cannot deny I feel let down and disappointed by its absence from a story that had ‘Private Eye’ stamped all over it within 48 hours of Mark Williams Thomas’s first bid for superstardom. We’ve done what they exist to do.

I’m so glad you’ve written this. It has been worrying many of us for ages. The answer is, pf course, even with The Eye, a good story trumps all else. And sadly the new generation haven’t noticed what a great story the truth is.

They didn’t even pick up on the liar that was David Icke, who eagerly claimed to have named Savile years before in the same book where he banged on about Ted Heath, who remains “unexposed”. Ickey ikey oy vey had never ever so much as mentioned Jimmy prior to three days after Jimmy died. A blatant lie easily confirmed by the simplest of google-searches in the case of his bookywook.http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-v4e21n4iWNQ/UoyLY7bae-I/AAAAAAAADZM/zJjOFJ4NRRA/s640/image002.jpg

Yes, I remember trawling through his entire web site – and the only mention before Jimmy Savile died was of someone wearing a Savile Row suit, and some story about a student called Savile – and yet there he was, on-line after he died, screeching ‘I told you all’…..! God knows who he told – certainly not Tom O’Caroll that he used to share a desk with on the Leicester Mercury…

Indeed, Private Eye’s cowardice has extended to almost completely ignoring the Savile saga from the beginning- neither for or against.

And what about Street of Shame? : surely no Glenda Slagg hack was more worthy of a mention in that column than the famous writer Dan Davies or “The Man Who Knew Jimmy Savile The Best” who penned a heart-wrenching article for the Daily Mail shortly after Savile’s demise headlined : Jimmy Savile: He Had A Heart Of Gold only to produce a tome a year later titled I Always Knew He Was A Wrongun or something similar.

What this shows is the sheer terror that the pedo fanatics have wreaked and how they have successfully silenced almost every facet of British society and it’s frightening. A sort of peculiar style of British Stalinism or our version of the Red Guards who threaten anyone who dares question tabloid sensationalism with a stint in a Re-Education Camp (possibly a new business for the enterprising Mark Williams-Thomas). If they can silence Private Eye, anyone can be.

The Eye piece reeks of desperation, as though written by an interested party who wishes, rather than cares about the unfortunate Ms Ward, to suppress any court libel action via the power of rich newspapers. Any libel action taken by Freddie Starr is bound to unravel and reveal far more murkiness about several of the orginators of the Savile claims. And they should be worried. Very.

Private Eye often gets it wrong, and most commonly in its Pseuds Corner section, especially anything to do with engineering or science, for which its arty types including the Hoslippian Foetus Mk 2, simply have no understanding. Which brings me to the article that once got my goat, namely a project to study ‘pogoing’ in sports stadiums used for rock concerts. The dynamic behaviour of structures is well-known but extremely poorly understood by anyone who can’t extract an eigenvalue from a structural stiffness matrix, and some tens of thousands of fans jumping up and down rhythmically have the potential to bring down an otherwise sound multi-million pound structure.

Then there was the attack on Merrist Wood’s HND in Golf Studies, a worthy course for putative managers and golf pros at any one of the UK’s over 3000 courses, where they learnt not how to hole a putt (an admission requirement was a reasonable golf handicap) but how to run the club membership, shop, bar, restaurant, keep the course in good shape, manage the staff – and accompany the odd unaccompanied rich member for a round.

Private Eye also took sides with the obnoxious Caroline Lucas (she of the face like a slapped arse) and other weirdos to oppose the reconstruction of the Undercliff Drive road on the Isle of Wight, shamefully naming staff of the council who had nothing to do with it (is that really what ‘naming and shaming’ is supposed to be about?) and thus resulting in abandonment of the project leading to the landslips of winter 2013-14 which destroyed houses and which would otherwise not have happened.

It’s not just the Eye, it’s the whole media. The BBC are the worst of the lot; with their resources, they could afford some decent scientifically or technically literate people on the journalistic staff. They can manage endless programmes about the arts, blanket coverage of the Oscars, and any amount of literary or dramatic criticism and discussion, but anything vaguely technical is always reduced to a puerile or facile level; Top Gear for example. Given the degree to which life depends on technology, this just seems odd.

* The BBC are the worst of the lot; with their resources, they could afford some decent scientifically or technically literate people on the journalistic staff *

They’re in Silo 14.

False memories New research examines the ability to implant completely made-up memories in people Duration: 08:17http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02k1sx3 False Memories How is it possible to remember something initially and then change your account of the experience later on? Possibly, giant swathes of your own personal history are partially fictional if not completely false. The problem isn’t that our memory is bad, but that we believe it isn’t. Adam talks to forensic psychologist Julia Shaw whose astonishing new research examines the ability to implant completely made-up rich false memories into ordinary people in a lab setting and points to circumstances under which police officers can extract false confessions.

I’m not getting your point here. I listened to this excellent BBC science programme earlier this week and the part about creating false memories was stunning. I suppose you could argue that the beeb could have run with the story more widely but on the other hand this research doesn’t seem to have been reported anywhere elsewhere in the MSM.

When Patten & Entwistle were busily making sure the Savile story was being tacitly accepted as fact by not defending the many thousands of ex-BB folk being branded paedo-enablers, there was an explanation that “Silo Management” was why the bounder had been able to get away with it all that time, in plain sight and how lessons needed to be learned. Not lessons about False Memory it seems.

As to Ray Teret, one of the media-victims was quoted in the Manchester Evening News [MY UPPER CASE]: “But the hugeness of what he had done, I didn’t realise at the time. As an adult, I do. I didn’t allow myself to go there, to think about it… IT WAS ONLY WHEN I DID THE POLICE INTERVIEW IT ALL BECAME REALLY APPARENT, that he had abused his position… that he was a child abuser, a paedophile, that he was the devil’s work.”http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/empire-of-gods-pt1.html

Erm – climate ‘science’, anyone? A proper examination of how electricity is generated and distributed, and how that might affect our energy security? Perhaps a look at how road vehicles are actually designed (and no, it’s not by a sharp-arse thinking of women and drawing curvy body panels…), developed and built? Some explanation of why aircraft become and remain airbourne? And that’s just for starters….

You are a bit behind the times regarding the media and clearly don’t read the Street of Shame section of PE. I forget the exact numbers but in the last year the BBC has laid off something like 400 people in the news section alone. The Telegraph has also made massive redundancies. There just into the manpower, let alone the will, for serious investigative reporting anymore. Indeed, there is an expression for the result: ‘churnalism’, interns sitting at a desk turning waffle dressed up as news by PR people from the news department inbox into ‘stories’. The TV equivalent is repeats and people sitting on sofas talking. Whatever costs least and upsets the advertisers least is what rules in today’s media.

It’s things like Private Eye’s curiously uncharacteristic decision to do any more than lightly satirize ‘the witch hunt’ that raises the dreaded ‘C’ word – Conspiracy.http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsm1os_hignfy-s37e04-rolf-harris-andy-hamilton-julia-hartley-brewer_fun If they cannot even chip away at the surface of the whole ridiculous charade and are dancing to the tune of a man closely tied with a disreputable law firm – hence no word on their takeover of not just the UK Personal Injury Law market but the subversion of the Rule Of Law to suit – then what purpose can Private Eye possibly serve other than that of a ‘more serious Viz’? But, with society heading the way it is, what would the long term future of the magazine be anyway to generations who have completely lost the ability to appreciate satire?

In think Private Eye are falling into media line on this one, the story’s are murky and libel can be ruinous, as they’ve found out before. The historic sex scandal business is great for parts of the media, some pressure groups and of course the pc driven police. As with many organisations such as the civil service and the police it doesn’t matter what you do , as long as you pay service to PC values, which you can sing about at you appraisal or performance review time. As such historic sex crimes tick so many boxes on this agenda, falling in line with feminist Pc values and exposing evil men. The evidence chain has withered with the passage of time, so you can trawl and manipulate fact to suit, then when you get a conviction you can show how good you are to your bosses. Hours of expensive police time spent investigating the likes of Rolf Harris and Max Clifford and indeed the phone hacking journos, when far more serious crimes have been committed but not resourced, like Irish terrorist murders and the current wave of cyber crimes for example. But it fits the PC agenda. Against this back drop I suspect Private Eye have thrown in the towel in this area

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here. Private Eye never had a huge staff of “Woodward & Bernsteins” beavering away on exposes. It always relied on Fleet Street journalists stabbing one another in the back or feeding it stories that their editors were frightened of – perhaps for advertorial reasons as touted by the recently deceased Peter Oborne. The simple truth in the matter of Savile is that not one single journalist [David Rose apparently excepted] who does not want to believe and was not embedded in the matter from the get-go and were we ever going to get truth from those brave journalists embedded with the troops in the Iraq War? No, we were not. So, who is going to write the expose? There is nobody left.

People are frightened to think. Once we lose the ability to think outside the orthodoxy, where the bogey-man lives, then we become too afraid to laugh in the dark. What point is there for satire, if the audience aren’t ‘getting it’?

The next generation are being raised exclusively by women; think about that.

Fear doesn’t just bring about the end of justice, it also brings about the end of joy. The very quirkiness of humour cannot function in a paranoid mind. The only laughter in a socialist dystopia, is derision of heretics; the very same people that composed the old Private Eye.

“Once we lose the ability to think outside the orthodoxy, where the bogey-man lives, then we become too afraid to laugh in the dark.” One of the glaring lessons that witch-hunts should teach us is that orthodoxy is the bogeyman.

Well I have cancelled my subscription, much as I enjoyed parts of the magazine. I had noted the two articles on Karin Ward but have also perceived a drift towards the liberal establishment. Perhaps Mr Hislop spends too much time at the BBC.

I’ve been reading PE for years, will hopefully never cancel the subscription. But … and this is a big BUT … they are certainly nowhere near as anti-establishment as they would like their readers to believe. From what I can see they have never ever seen extra regulation that they didn’t like (except, of course, when it came to regulation that might affect them, ie: Leveson), and for all their fine cataloguing of how government screws things up, they are frequently included in the ones who will screech about how government must “do something”.

It seems to have been quite some time since David Rose’s last piece – has he been quietly swept under the carpet? If so, it’s a great pity, since any number of irrefutable facts can be accrued online yet still be casually dismissed by the Great British Public as a whole as nothing more than the ranting of “conspiracy nuts” or “nonce apologists”. Print them in a widely read publication, or broadcast them on TV, however, and people are more likely to take notice – as Tom Robinson observed all those years ago, “It’s there in the papers, it MUST be the truth!” What is so different about this particular moral panic that prevents any public probing into the other side of the story, or even mockery through satire? No Brass Eye special (or nearest equivalent) to cover this one, despite the same subject being tackled as recently as 2001… Those who do have the courage to probe and/or mock aren’t being heard as widely as they should be. Those who do have access to a wider audience seem either to be too cowed by fear of “causing offence” (the blight of the PC era) that they stop themselves before they’ve started – or else have just swallowed this whole thing from the beginning. Troubling times.

As I recall, PE were quite late to the Satanic Abuse party, but made up for it with blistering exposes of the main characters (such as Valerie Sinason). Perhaps I’m a hopeless optimist, but maybe they’ll be featuring similar pieces on the “Savile Panic” in a few years’ time?

It was quite disillusioning to find that even Ingrams seemed to have lost the power to reason.

““I just thought it was a good story,” says editor Richard Ingrams. “It’s hard to remember now but Savile was not exactly venerated prior to this exposure. I remember being rather amazed by the way the obituaries of Savile didn’t mention these rumours that we were all aware of – it was totally airbrushed out of his story.” “I don’t think anyone’s really explained how he got away with it,” he says, noting that people have suggested that surely Private Eye, which Ingrams co-founded and edited until 1986, knew something – “we didn’t”. Ingrams says he never suppressed any Savile stories at Private Eye and believes the story may never have been told before because victims were too “scared” to expose him.http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/why-oldie-exposed-savile-child-abuse-i-just-thought-it-was-good-story

You see this for me is the part that just does not ring true. This is the editor of Private Eye talking here, the man who had the contacts and the material and the sheer brass neck to go after and point or hint at wrong-doings on the part of some of the most powerful men in the country – moguls like Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch or business titans like Sir James Goldsmith. Men who had the might and the clout to to crush the tiny company legally like they would a fly (and indeed who came close to doing so on occasion). Fear to the Eye meant nothing. Fear of being wrong, fear of revenge? Unimportant as long as they got the message out.

So how with a straight face can Ingrams say that it was “fear” that suppressed any and all Savile stories during his lifetime. Fear of an eccentric radio DJ and children’s TV presenter from Yorkshire whose personal financial resources extended to a handful of tatty flats. Bollocks. Inordinate, naive bollocks. And astonishing that anyone swallows that at face value.

The only fear that is instilled now is the fear of being seen to go against the presumed ‘truth’ and speak out. I have full respect for those like our esteemed hosts who have the freedom to do so. I’ve only once alluded publicly to my cynicism about the whole circus and was immediately met with incredulity and abuse from people who immediately attempted to link my views back to the media organisation I work for. Sinister really, but that’s how fantatical people are about this.

The daft thing is I have a Savile story of my own. A tale of approaching him for career guidance and the generous granting of his time, during the course of which he gave me extensive advice on how to conduct oneself as a celebrity with stern instructions to behave in the exact opposite way to that which he is accused in death of spending every moment doing. I’ll tell it in full at a time of my choosing, but first I will have to make sure I’m in a place where I can comfortably brush off the negativity that I’ll inevitably visit upon myself.

I agree Ingrams’ stance does seem very odd, especially considering the Eye had no qualms about printing Cyril Smith stories as long ago as 1979 – and surely as an MP, Smith had far more ‘power’ than Jimmy Savile.

The important point is again that Private Eye never sourced their stories from Joe Public. It was always a Fleet Street game. So what Ingrams is basically saying is that no journalist ever came to him on the sly with some real meat about Jimmy Savile. “Fear” doesn’t even enter into it. They had absolutely nothing.

The whole thing is a series of “dirty jokes” made real after the guy snuffed it. Jimmy was a bachelor boy who made shows for kiddies – wahay…. nudge nudge. Gambaccini’s story is simply that Jimmy hung around the ” subnormals”, therefore Jimmy must have been sexing them up. It says more about Gambaccini than Jimmy Savile. Cretinous behaviour was ever thus but the more subversive behaviour is from Police who gave this initial credibility and then CPS who have condoned clear lying. Neither body has ever once slapped down the media, and we all saw the clear collusion when they made their clumsy attempt to bag Sir Cliff.

The corruption is in black and white in Jim Davidsons book. He gave the cops the evidence that a witness claiming assault at the Palladium couldn’t be belived and the cops got her to change her story to Slough! The whole thing is beyond a joke.

And the late Leon Brittan was also gossiped about with vile rumours for decades but it took a left wing Labour Party member and investigative journalist Paul Foot to research those rumours and conclude they were a nasty campaign to undermine Brittan and there was absolutely no truth in the claims. And Paul Foot could not have more an anti-Thetcherite if he tried- but he was Honest. Igrams is being bloody dishonest and it’s a disgrace to journalism.

I wonder if this is another symptom of the slow demise of the Dead Tree Press? Scanning the Telegraph website yesterday, a story about a tenanted property in Telford left in an appallingly filthy state by the outgoing incumbent was tagged ‘By Agency’ – seems the Telegraph has so few staff journalists left that they just download press releases or anything else they can find to fill the screen (though they still have some good freelancers on the books). Not that the Telegraph are alone in that, either.

The rise of Twitter seems to be cutting out the middleman in political reporting – those who really want to know what politicians and their apparatchiks are saying as soon as they say it glue themselves to their ‘hand-held devices’. Most people don’t really care; they just want the busy person’s summary once a day, gleaned from their TV news channel of choice, and of course there are those more concerned about the football scores or which celeb is shagging which other than with events in Syria or Ukraine.

Perhaps in this rush for immediacy, we have started to lose something; the longer, careful investigation, analysis and reporting of events. Because there’s less of that going on, there are far fewer journalists, and thus the seam for the Eye to mine is getting much thinner. Thus, they miss things. Big things.

Hislop has made the mistake of going native. His regular appearances on TV, complete with oddly silent “mirth”, speak to his (and by extension, his organ’s) longing to be accepted into The Establishment. I wouldn’t expect any boat-rocking revelations to emerge from his direction.

Had an Eye subscription for many years. I can’t imagine going out of my way to buy it, but the subscription is cheap. I think the point has been made that there is no Paul Foot replacement for the bigger productions. For the short term stuff it’s difficult for a fortnightly print to be relevant. I tend to have a quick scan, read Rotten Boroughs, look at the cartoons, then do the crossword, and return at leisure. It’s lasted longer that Guido did, but it’s never going to get the pulse racing. Pipe & slippers; Punch with politics.

Punch lasted a good eighty years before drifting downhill toward extinction and its politics went from Chartist sympathizer to jingoist , but its cartoons somehow caught and shaped the public mood . I’ll keep my Punch compendia and ditch the yellowing PE’s if I need to.Incidentally , the1846 cartoon of Gladstone in a pram as nanny tries to soothe him, saying ‘Kerch,Kerch ‘would do well for Cameron or McCain and the Crimea. As the prisoner on the treadmill in the first edition says”Things may take another turn’.

Even in more recent times, just a few decades ago, Punch was a welcome sight in the doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room. I can’t see the Eye being much in demand even if the health police fear of frayed & germ-ridden magazines & papers could be overcome. I have to wonder how it ever gets a new subscriber. Perhaps as with big motorbikes it’s another manifestation of the older & should know better reliving times long gone.

I recall seeing a Punch cartoon in a book about the First World War, showing how the war office imagines an officer to look, complete with Pince Ne and baton. To the right was how he actually looked, armed with a rifle. To the right of that showed how the officer looked a few months later, caked in mud and with a massive matted beard. It was hilarious, and has stuck in my mind ever since.